7 Best TinyFish Alternatives in 2026
TinyFish sells infrastructure for AI agents that work on the live web. Four products sit behind one API key and one credit pool: Search returns structured JSON from real browser-rendered results, Fetch turns a rendered page into clean markdown or JSON, Agent runs multi-step automation, and Browser gives you raw cloud sessions with stealth built in.
The engineering is aimed squarely at the hard part. TinyFish compiles C++ patches into the Chromium binary and reports an 85% anti-bot pass rate, scores 89.9% on the Mind2Web benchmark, and ships Vault so agents can authenticate into portals without credentials ever reaching the model. Mako is its web-native model for live workflows, and MCP support means Claude and Cursor can drive it directly. Search and Fetch are free; Agent and Browser cost one credit per agent step or four minutes of browsing, with 500 credits to start. It raised $47 million in an ICONIQ-led round and names Google, DoorDash, Amazon, Grubhub, and ClassPass among its customers.
It’s a serious product for a specific problem: reaching systems that don’t want to be reached programmatically. The reason to look at alternatives is usually that your problem is a different one.
Three problems that look identical from the outside
They get confused constantly, and buying for the wrong one is expensive:
- “I need to reach a system.” Pull orders from a supplier, sync a CRM, post to a channel, file an invoice. If it has an API, a web agent is the slowest and most brittle way to do it.
- “I need content from pages.” Prices, listings, docs, competitor changes. That’s retrieval — no interaction, no session, and it should cost a fraction of an agent run.
- “I need to operate a UI nobody exposed.” A carrier portal, a legacy government system, an authenticated dashboard with no API at all. This is the real web-agent problem, and it’s the one TinyFish is built for.
1. Browser Use
The open-source harness that most of this category was built on, plus a managed cloud around it. Stealth browsers with CAPTCHA solving across 195+ countries, residential proxies, scheduled jobs, webhooks, and Browser Use Box — a 24/7 Claude agent you reach over Telegram, web, or SSH.
vs. TinyFish: you can read it, fork it, and self-host it, which TinyFish’s Chromium patches rule out by design. Cloud pricing is published rather than credit-opaque: Free at $0 with 3 concurrent sessions, Dev $29/month for 25, Business $299 for 200, Scaleup $999 for 500, with sessions at $0.02/hour and proxies at $5/GB on top.
Best for: teams who want the open-source option and predictable published pricing. Browser Use alternatives has the full comparison.
2. Browserbase
Managed browser infrastructure that runs Chrome for you while your own automation code drives it, with Stagehand available for writing steps in natural language.
vs. TinyFish: less opinionated. TinyFish gives you an Agent API that decides how to accomplish a goal; Browserbase gives you browsers and gets out of the way. Free covers 3 concurrent browsers and 1 hour; Developer is $20/month for 25 concurrent and 100 hours at $0.12/hour overage; Startup is $99/month for 100 concurrent and 500 hours; Scale is custom with HIPAA, DPA, and SSO. Auto-CAPTCHA solving is included from the Developer tier.
Best for: engineering teams with existing automation who need infrastructure, not a decision-maker.
3. Steel
Open-source browser infrastructure, Apache-2.0 licensed with 7,000+ stars — a batteries-included browser sandbox you can self-host with Docker or run in their cloud.
vs. TinyFish: portability. TinyFish’s advantage comes from C++ patches compiled into its own Chromium binary, which by definition you can’t take with you; Steel’s whole proposition is that you can. It speaks Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium rather than imposing an API, starts sessions in under a second, runs them up to 24 hours, and solves CAPTCHAs natively. Launch is $0/month plus usage with $30 in one-time credits; Scale is $250/month plus usage with $100 monthly credits, a dedicated Slack channel, and SSO; Enterprise supports 1,000+ concurrent sessions with reserved pools.
Best for: teams who want cloud browsers with a real self-host escape route.
4. Stagehand
An agent framework rather than infrastructure, built by the Browserbase team. MIT licensed, 23,000+ stars, TypeScript-first, and structured as an augmentation of Playwright — you write ordinary automation code and drop in act, extract, and observe where the model should decide.
vs. TinyFish: you keep control of the logic. TinyFish’s Agent API decides how to accomplish a goal; Stagehand leaves the plan in your code and calls the model only at the ambiguous steps, which is cheaper to run and much easier to debug. The v3 rewrite in February 2026 talks directly to the Chrome DevTools Protocol and runs about 44% faster.
Best for: engineers who want deterministic code with AI escape hatches.
5. Skyvern
The vision-based framework. Skyvern combines computer vision with LLM reasoning instead of CSS selectors, so workflows survive UI changes rather than breaking on them.
vs. TinyFish: a different answer to the same reliability problem. Where TinyFish engineers the browser to get past detection, Skyvern engineers the perception layer to get past brittleness. It solves CAPTCHAs without third-party services, handles two-factor authentication, and is HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant. Y Combinator backed, $2.7 million raised in December 2025, 30,000+ users, and 5,000 free credits a month with no card. It’s AGPL-3.0, which matters if you’re embedding it commercially.
Best for: authenticated portals, forms, and regulated workflows.
6. Firecrawl
Purpose-built for the second problem on the list above. Scrape a page, crawl a site, search, or monitor for changes, returning clean markdown or structured JSON.
vs. TinyFish: it overlaps TinyFish’s Search and Fetch directly, and costs almost nothing for pure retrieval — one credit per page scraped or crawled, two per browser-minute when a page needs interaction, with 1,000 credits free. If you never needed multi-step interaction, this is the entire product at a fraction of the complexity.
Best for: market intelligence, competitor monitoring, and RAG pipelines.
7. Carly, for the first problem
Not infrastructure, and not a substitute for TinyFish’s Agent or Browser APIs. Carly belongs on this page only because the first of the three problems above — “I need to reach a system” — is the one people most often bring to a web-agent vendor by mistake.
Around 260 apps connect natively — Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, Shopify, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Jira, Airtable, Notion — and anything else with a public API connects with your own key, pasted on the integrations page. The test is that simple: if the system exposes an API, Carly integrates with it, and no browser enters the picture.
What you get on top is a finished agent rather than a client library. Describe the job in plain English, scope the tools it may touch, give it its own email address, and it runs on a schedule or when mail arrives — reading the message, pulling the record, updating the system, booking the slot, and replying.
Where it doesn’t apply: a carrier portal or legacy dashboard with no API at all. That’s genuinely TinyFish’s problem, and Apify is a native Carly integration if you want scraped data to land somewhere that acts on it.
Driving it from your own code — provisioning agents per tenant, embedding it in your product, running high volume — is available. Book a call with the team and we’ll scope it to your setup.
Pricing: free for unlimited Zapier-style workflows, AI agents from $35/month.
Best for: integration work that got misfiled as web automation.
Choosing between them
The target has an API. Direct integration or Carly. Nothing below this line is cheaper or more reliable than the door that’s already open.
You need page content. Firecrawl, at a fraction of the cost of agent steps.
You want a framework, not a black box. Stagehand to keep the plan in your own code, Skyvern when the targets are authenticated portals and forms, Browser Use for the largest open-source ecosystem.
You need infrastructure. Browserbase for developer experience, Steel for Apache-2.0 and a self-host path.
You need to operate a UI with no API, unattended, against active bot detection. This is TinyFish’s home ground, and the Chromium-level work and Vault credential handling are real differentiators at enterprise scale.
The expensive mistake is treating all three problems as one. AI browser automation tools maps the wider landscape, and the best AI agents for productivity covers agents that act on business systems rather than pages.
FAQ
What is TinyFish?
TinyFish is enterprise infrastructure for AI web agents. It provides four products behind one API key and credit pool — Search for browser-rendered structured results, Fetch for clean page content, Agent for multi-step automation, and Browser for raw cloud sessions with stealth. It reports an 85% anti-bot pass rate from C++ patches compiled into Chromium and 89.9% on the Mind2Web benchmark, and Vault lets agents authenticate into portals without exposing credentials to the model.
What is the best TinyFish alternative?
For the largest open-source framework and ecosystem, Browser Use. For deterministic code with AI only where it’s needed, Stagehand. For authenticated portals and form-heavy work, Skyvern’s vision-based approach. For infrastructure, Browserbase or Steel, the latter Apache-2.0 with a Docker self-host path. For content extraction without interaction, Firecrawl at a fraction of the cost. And for reaching business systems that already expose APIs, Carly connects to around 260 apps natively and completes the task rather than returning data.
How much do AI web agents cost?
TinyFish makes Search and Fetch free and charges one credit per agent step or four minutes of browsing, starting with 500 credits. Browser Use Cloud is $0 to $999/month by concurrency, plus $0.02/hour per session and $5/GB for proxies. Browserbase is $20 to $99/month with hourly overages. Scraping is far cheaper than agent steps, so route retrieval-only work there.
Do I need a web agent if the system has an API?
No. An API call is faster, cheaper, and doesn’t break when the page layout changes. Web agents exist for systems that expose no programmatic access — legacy portals, authenticated dashboards, vendors without APIs. Check for an API first, including undocumented endpoints the site’s own front end calls.
Is web agent automation legal?
It depends on the site’s terms of service, the jurisdiction, and what you do with the data. Automating a portal your company already has credentials for is different from scraping a site that forbids it, and personal data brings privacy law into scope. Vendors provide the capability, not the permission — get that reviewed before running anything at scale.
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